Mulberry and Windows 11

Thanks to all for comments and suggestions.  Taking the liberty
of responding to several notes in one message...

> ----------------------- -------
On Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2023 16:31:23 -0700, Joan Korenman
<[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi John,
> I too am still using Mulberry, but I'm doing so on Windows 10.
> I am not  eager to move to 11, and your message simply
> confirms my reluctance.
> 
> I'm replying simply to say that you're not the only Mulberry
> user left, and  to ask that if you find a solution to the W11
> problem, you let the forum  know.  I should mention that I
> have Thunderbird as well on my computer, but  it hasn't
> managed to replace Mulberry.

Joan,

Thanks.  The switch to Win10 was not exactly voluntary.  I tried
Thunderbird some years ago, got frustrated, and gave up, but I
suppose I should start looking at it again in addition to
continuing to push at the Win11 problems.  

Will definitely let you and others know if I find out anything
useful.

And, yes, this is coming to you from a Win10 machine.

>...
>-------------------------

On Sun, 2 Apr 2023 16:30:02 -0400, Gleason <[email protected]>,
wrote:

Gleason,

>...

> I no longer use Mulberry, but I would look for with a firewall
> type issue.  It might be cleared to receive, but is it
> cleared to send? 

That was my first thought but I tried running the (sending)
SMTP connection over an SSH tunnel to the server and that
doesn't work either.  Typing SMTP commands and a sample message
into the tunnel does get through, so, if this is a firewall
issue, it is very subtle.

> Win 11 is a cantankerous beast prone to telling me I can't 
> use the software I want to use.  I am sticking with 10.

At this point, that is the advice I would give others.  But I
needed a hardware upgrade and the machine that seemed right came
only with Win11.  As far as I know, Microsoft discontinued the
option of downgrading to 10 (or I would have done that at the
beginning).  I've now made a rather large time investment in
trying to get Win11 to work so, while going back is still
possible, I hope to avoid it.  On the other hand, if I cannot
get Mulberry to work properly and people continue to tell me
about Thunderbird's deficiencies (and not point to better
options), that might be the tipping point.

>...

>---------------------

On Date: Sun, 02 Apr 2023 19:46:28 -0700, Kenneth Porter
<[email protected]> wrote:

> I, too, run Mulberry (my own build) on Windows 10 x64 side by
> side with  Thunderbird. Mulberry is much more reliable at
> spotting new folders. I  often create folders from Mulberry or
> on the server and Thunderbird fails  to detect them until I go
> into its Subscribe dialog and force it to see  them.
> Thunderbird is fast at detecting new mail. Mulberry is more
> fragile  and will crash at least once a day. (I'm pretty sure
> it's a threading  issue, doing things GUI things on the worker
> thread, but I haven't tried to  chase it down.)

FWIW, I have not had that experience with the 4.0.6 build.  I do
occasionally get crashes, but typically at intervals of weeks,
not per-day.

> Thunderbird
> handles formatted mail much better and almost  all commercial
> mail (even Reddit notifications) is unreadable on Mulberry.

I actually consider Mulberry's inability to adequately interpret
and format HTML to be an advantage.  I mostly deal with and
respond to messages in plain text form, which saves me worrying
about all sorts of privacy and security issues -- not just
tracking stuff but scripts running in the browser, going through
links that might make me unhappy, etc.  

On the other hand, I don't used Reddit or anything else that I
might really want to receive and that might frequently send out
messages that are incomprehensible without good HTML rendering.
If I did, I might change my mind.

>  I
> use Thunderbird in dark mode theme and sometimes the
> foreground color is  wrong and I get black on black so that's
> a pain.

Will keep that option in mind, thanks.

> I considered writing my own clone of Mulberry but there are no
> good open  source C++ libraries for IMAP and SMTP that build
> easily on Windows. (The  ones I've found look like they'd
> build easily on *nix.) I also found it  hard to build the SSL
> stuff, but it looks like OpenSSL has gotten slightly  easier
> to build on Windows. I just built the latest version as a
> prereq for  the new Boost.MySQL library.
> 
> More recently, I noticed that Python has a built-in IMAP
> library with a  fork that looks well-maintained, so I was
> considering building a client in  Python. C++ would give me a
> single binary for easier distribution, but  Python is far more
> rich in available libraries, like the IMAP one.
> 
> Yet another approach I'd considered was building a pure Linux
> client, using  the Windows WSL system to run it. Or I could
> simply run it remotely on a  Raspberry Pi. I use the VcXsrv X
> server on Windows to run X apps on my Pi  and my CentOS
> servers. This would be a good excuse to learn how to build 
> Linux apps with Visual Studio.

If you do develop something, please keep the rest of us posted.
I'd volunteer to help but fear my days of doing
production-quality programming are probably over.

   Thanks again to all,
    john